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Managing Wildlife within U.S. National Forests
Abstract
The main question addressed in this research is whether the Forest Service has been able to maintain control over its wildlife conservation program in the face of increased interest and policymaking activity from the president and Congress. Determining who has influence over wildlife management decisions is assessed by examining the development of national forest policies over the past 30 years along with more recent shifts in rulemaking and the allocation of staff and budgetary resources. I conclude that political institutions have been increasingly successful in their efforts to shape wildlife program decisions through both policy and regulatory initiatives. This includes the willingness of public officials to make greater use of positive incentives to obtain agency cooperation as well as the threat of sanctions for agency noncompliance.
Modern bureaucracy faces trade-offs between public and congressional input and agency expertise. The U.S. Forest Service offers an opportunity to quantitatively analyze whether an agency that is required to be more open to the public and congressional input will be forced to ignore its technical expertise in managing resources. This study uses data on 83,000 hazardous fuels reduction activities conducted by the Forest Service from 2001 to 2011. Although the results show that managers are responsive to public and congressional considerations, this has not prevented them from utilizing their technical knowledge to restore lands most deviated from natural conditions. This suggests that managers can balance responsiveness to public and political principals with technically sound management.
Over the last ten years or so, an important new approach to the study of organizations has emerged within economics. It is perhaps best characterized by three elements: a contractual perspective on organizational relationships, a theoretical focus on hierarchical control, and formal analysis via principal-agent models. This paper provides political scientists with an overview of the "new economics of organization" and explores its implications for the study of public bureaucracy. So far, positive political theory has not contributed much to our understanding of public bureaucracy. In part this is due to the unsympathetic treatment that rational modeling and most other modes of quantitative analysis have long received from students of public administration. The other side of the coin, however, is that positive theorists have not made much of an effort to develop theories of bureaucracy. Their concerns have centered around two basic mechanisms of social choice, voting and markets, and they have devoted little systematic attention to a third mechanism that is clearly important for understanding how societies and other aggregates make collective decisions. This third and relatively unexplored mechanism is hierarchy. Movement toward a positive theory of hierarchies would fill a serious gap in the social choice literature, while at the same time making a theoretical contribution that strikes to the essence of public bureaucracy, indeed of all organizations. In fact, significant steps toward a positive theory of hierarchies have very recently been taken-but by economists, not political scientists. In small numbers, of course, economists made contributions to the study of public bureaucracy some time ago with the pioneering works of Downs (1967), Tullock (1965), and Niskanen (1971). But this new wave of theoretical work is different. It is already a large, complex body of literature that is the focus of innovation and excitement among a growing number of economists, and it reflects an unusual degree of theoretical coherence and cumulative effort. Work in this tradition tends to receive orientation from a distinctive economic approach to the analysis of organizations, an approach perhaps best characterized by three elements: a contractual perspective on organizational relationships, a focus on hierarchical control, and formal analysis via principal-agent models. This approach has emerged from recent attempts to move beyond the neoclassical theory of the firm, which assumes away all organizational considerations, to a theory of economic organizations that can explain why firms, corporations, and other enterprises behave as they do. Propo
In December 1997, Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman convened an interdisciplinary committee of 13 scientists to provide scientific and technical advice on the Forest Service's land and resource management planning process. The committee was asked to recommend how best to accomplish resource planning within the existing environmental laws and statutory mission of the Forest Service; to provide technical advice on planning and provide material for the agency to consider in revising planning regulations; to recommend improvements in coordination with other federal agencies, state and local government agencies, and tribal governments; and to suggest a new planning framework that could last a generation. The committee took field trips and met in cities and towns around the country to hear from Forest Service employees, representatives of tribes, state and local governments, related federal natural resource agencies, and members of the public. Drawing on many of the approaches and improvements to planning it observed, the committee has made its recommendations.
"George W. Bush's Healthy Forests reads like a textbook for political activists, arguing that the most important part of any political strategy is to craft a simple, persuasive message that demonizes opponents while it points to your preferred policy as the only solution to major problems. Vaugn and Cortner note that, having won this battle over forest policy, congressional Republicans have attempted to use the same strategy of blaming environmentalists to promote their agendas on grazing, mining, and other issues."-Forest Magazine" Vaughn and Cortner argue that the weakening of environmental laws was by design, not a byproduct of budget cuts. . . . The authors argue that the Bush administration succeeded because it cast environmentalists as 'nuts' and 'extremists,' in spite of the fact that many environmental groups have long supported thinning of small trees around communities at the wildland-urban interface."-High Country News This groundbreaking study analyzes the context and legal effects of the Healthy Forests Initiative, Healthy Forests Restoration Act, and related regulatory changes. The authors show how the Bush administration used news events such as wildfires to propel legislation through Congress. Focusing blame for wildfires on legal obstacles and environmentalists' use of appeals to challenge fuel-reduction projects, the administration restricted opportunities for environmental analysis, administrative appeals, and litigation. The authors argue that these tools have a history of use by diverse interests and have long protected Americans' right to question government decisions. This readable study identifies the players, events, and strategies that expedited the policy shift and contextualizes it in the president's career and in legislative and administrative history. Revealing a policy change with major implications for the future of public lands and public process, George W. Bush's Healthy Forests will become required reading in environmental studies and and political science.
The state has made a comeback in political science over the last twenty years. A synthesis of sorts of traditional and behavioral approaches to the study of politics, statist theory, in its methodology, is at once historical, institutional, and empirical. This study of the U.S. Forest Service both illustrates and critiques the statist approach, and also adds to the growing literature on the Progressive Movement's role in the building of an American state in the early years of this century.
Multiple theories of bureaucratic behavior are integrated for this study. Planning decisions made by the U.S. Forest Service are a function of hierarchical controls, bureaucratic conservatism, the professional/policy orientation of agency officials, the strength of local constituency groups, and officials' alleged desire to maximize budgets. Output levels contained in a set of Forest-plan alternatives and a survey of the perceptions of approximately 1,090 agency officials involved in the planning process for a sample of 44 national forests. Pressures for the status quo and the activities of local amenity coalitions were more important than hierarchical controls from Congress, OMB (Office of Management and Budget), and the national office of the U.S. Forest Service.
Quantitative indicators of change for non-commodity resource management were examined, to assess whether the United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service has been changing its on-the-ground management practices to give more emphasis to non-commodity resources. Specifically, data on recreation management and on wildlife and fish habitat management were analyzed to determine whether any shifts in the agency's management priorities had occurred. All data examined indicate that the Forest Service has been increasing its activities in non-commodity resource management over historic levels. When viewed in context with other recent studies suggesting that the Forest Service is moving away from traditional commodity production, the results of this study provide evidence that a significant shift has occurred, or presently is occurring, in Forest Service management practices.
The Forest Service adopted Ecosystem Management as a political strategy, the ecological and scientific aspects of the framework notwithstanding. Ecosystem Management was an ambiguous, undefined concept that the agency could shape in the context of political events. This article tells the story of the Forest Service's crisis and its awkward attempts to regain autonomy and prestige. In the volatile and politicized atmosphere of forest policy, the Forest Service attempted to change its image by adopting a new name for its practices, resorting to the common practice of meeting conflict and crisis with vague, sensationalist political imagery and drama.
In spite of recent arguments that significant changes are occurring in the United States Department of Agriculture's Forest Service, to date little empirical evidence exists demonstrating that this is indeed the case and whether these presumed changes are impacting upon substantive policy outcomes. Most of the current evidence available is from studies that have inferred change by measuring attitudinal change in Forest Service employees. None to date has examined changes in quantitative indicators of agency policy efforts or outcomes.
In this article, we analyze trends in the budget requests of the Forest Service, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and appropriations made by Congress, to ascertain whether priorities of these actors concerning the commodity and non‐commodity programs of the National Forests have changed since the passage of the National Forest Management Act. The data reveal shifting priorities for the Forest Service, USDA, and OMB. However, although the shifts have been greater for the Forest Service than for the other two agencies, they have been significantly less than the shifts in congressional appropriations. This fact suggests that Congress is changing its view of how the Forest Service should manage its lands more quickly than the Forest Service is changing itself, and that, as some have argued, Congress has been an important external agent of change concerning the agency and its policies.
Timber output, the major commodity use of the National Forests, was tracked from 1981 to 1993, to assess changes that have occurred in the amount of timber offered, sold, and harvested. In addition, changes in the method of harvest used on the National Forests were examined to view trends in the management practices of the Forest Service. Although trends regarding changes in timber harvest methods varied from region to region, data on timber offered, sold, and harvested showed a dramatic decrease both nationally and in important timber-producing regions since the late 1980s. This reduction, when seen in the light of other recent studies, suggests that the Forest Service is changing the emphasis of its management practices, placing less priority on the traditional high level of timber output.
The United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service traditionally has been dominated by white, male for esters, particularly in its professional and leadership ranks. Beginning in the mid-1970s, however, civil rights legislation, lawsuits, and statutes that mandated interdisciplinary planning collectively impelled the agency to begin diversifying by race, gender, and profession. This study attempts to quantify the progress the agency has made in workforce diversification since the early 1980s by grouping Forest Service job series into categories and tracking changes in these categories over time. The study reveals that the numbers of employees in “nontraditional” Forest Service fields (e.g., the social and biological sciences) increased markedly, but that these employees remain vastly outnumbered by employees in traditional fields such as forestry. The number of women in the agency also increased greatly, but women made much greater gains in administrative support positions than in jobs that put them in the pipeline for leadership positions. They remain vastly overrepresented in clerical and administrative positions and highly under rep resented in professional and technical positions. People of color made gains in nearly all job categories, but, like women, remain significantly overrepresented in jobs that will not lead to leadership positions. Thus, while aggregate numbers show greater diversity in the Forest Service workforce, a more detailed analysis reveals that the leadership ranks are still the domain of white, male foresters.
In Crossing the Next Meridian, Charles F. Wilkinson, an expert on federal public lands, Native American issues, and the West's arcane water laws explains some of the core problems facing the American West now and in the years to come. He examines the outmoded ideas that pervade land use and resource allocation and argues that significant reform of Western law is needed to combat desertification and environmental decline, and to heal splintered communities. Interweaving legal history with examples of present-day consequences of the laws, both intended and unintended, Wilkinson traces the origins and development of the laws and regulations that govern mining, ranching, forestry, and water use. He relates stories of Westerners who face these issues on a day-to-day basis, and discusses what can and should be done to bring government policies in line with the reality of twentieth-century American life.
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